XI
Never in her life had Frida enjoyed anything so much as those
first four happy days at Heymoor. She had come away with Bertram
exactly as Bertram himself desired her to do, without one thought
of anything on earth except to fulfil the higher law of her own
nature; and she was happy in her intercourse with the one man who
could understand it, the one man who had waked it to its fullest
pitch, and could make it resound sympathetically to his touch in
every chord and every fibre. They had chosen a lovely spot on a
heather-clad moorland, where she could stroll alone with Bertram
among the gorse and ling, utterly oblivious of Robert Monteith and
the unnatural world she had left for ever behind her. Her soul
drank in deep draughts of the knowledge of good and evil from
Bertram's lips; she felt it was indeed a privilege to be with him
and listen to him; she wondered how she could ever have endured
that old bad life with the lower man who was never her equal, now
she had once tasted and known what life can be when two well-
matched souls walk it together, abreast, in holy fellowship.
The children, too, were as happy as the day was long. The heath was
heaven to them. They loved Bertram well, and were too young to be
aware of anything unusual in the fact of his accompanying them. At
the little inn on the hill-top where they stopped to lodge, nobody
asked any compromising questions: and Bertram felt so sure he could
soon complete his arrangements for taking Frida and the children
"home," as he still always phrased it, that Frida had no doubts for
their future happiness. As for Robert Monteith, that bleak, cold
man, she hardly even remembered him: Bertram's first kiss seemed
almost to have driven the very memory of her husband clean out of
her consciousness. She only regretted, now she had left him, the
false and mistaken sense of duty which had kept her so long tied to
an inferior soul she could never love, and did wrong to marry.
And all the time, what strange new lessons, what beautiful truths,
she learned from Bertram! As they strolled together, those sweet
August mornings, hand locked in hand, over the breezy upland, what
new insight he gave her into men and things! what fresh impulse he
supplied to her keen moral nature! The misery and wrong of the
world she lived in came home to her now in deeper and blacker hues
than ever she had conceived it in: and with that consciousness came
also the burning desire of every wakened soul to right and redress
it. With Bertram by her side, she felt she could not even harbour
an unholy wish or admit a wrong feeling; that vague sense of his
superiority, as of a higher being, which she had felt from the very
first moment she met him at Brackenhurst, had deepened and grown
more definite now by closer intercourse; and she recognised that
what she had fallen in love with from the earliest beginning was
the beauty of holiness shining clear in his countenance. She had
chosen at last the better part, and she felt in her soul that, come
what might, it could not be taken away from her.
In this earthly paradise of pure love, undefiled, she spent three
full days and part of another. On the morning of the fourth, she
sent the country girl they had engaged to take care of the
children, out on the moor with the little ones, while she herself
and Bertram went off alone, past the barrow that overlooks the
Devil's Saucepan, and out on the open ridge that stretches with
dark growth of heath and bracken far away into the misty blue
distance of Hampshire. Bertram had just been speaking to her, as
they sat on the dry sand, of the buried chieftain whose bones still
lay hid under that grass-grown barrow, and of the slaughtered wives
whose bodies slept beside him, massacred in cold blood to accompany
their dead lord to the world of shadows. He had been contrasting
these hideous slaveries of taboo-ridden England, past or present,
with the rational freedom of his own dear country, whither he hoped
so soon with good luck to take her, when suddenly Frida raised her
eager eyes from the ground, and saw somebody or something coming
across the moor from eastward in their direction.
All at once, a vague foreboding of evil possessed her. Hardly quite
knowing why, she felt this approaching object augured no good to
their happiness. "Look, Bertram," she cried, seizing his arm in her
fright, "there's somebody coming."
Bertram raised his eyes and looked. Then he shaded them with his
hands. "How strange!" he said simply, in his candid way: "it looks
for all the world just like the man who was once your husband!"
Frida rose in alarm. "Oh, what can we do?" she cried, wringing her
hands. "What ever can we do? It's he! It's Robert!"
"Surely he can't have come on purpose!" Bertram exclaimed, taken
aback. "When he sees us, he'll turn aside. He must know of all
people on earth he's the one least likely at such a time to be
welcome. He can't want to disturb the peace of another man's
honeymoon!"
But Frida, better used to the savage ways of the world she had
always lived in, made answer, shrinking and crouching, "He's hunted
us down, and he's come to fight you."
"To fight me!" Bertram exclaimed. "Oh, surely not that! I was told
by those who ought best to know, you English had got far beyond the
stage of private war and murderous vendetta."
"For everything else," Frida answered, cowering down in her terror
of her husband's vengeance, not for herself indeed so much as for
Bertram. "For everything else, we have; but NOT for a woman."
There was no time just then, however, for further explanation of
this strange anomaly. Monteith had singled them out from a great
distance with his keen, clear sight, inherited from generations of
Highland ancestors, and now strode angrily across the moor, with
great wrathful steps, in his rival's direction. Frida nestled close
to Bertram, to protect her from the man to whom her country's laws
and the customs of her tribe would have handed her over blindfold.
Bertram soothed her with his hand, and awaited in silence, with
some dim sense of awe, the angry barbarian's arrival.
He came up very quickly, and stood full in front of them, glaring
with fierce eyes at the discovered lovers. For a minute or two his
rage would not allow him to speak, nor even to act; he could but
stand and scowl from under his brows at Bertram. But after a long
pause his wrath found words. "You infernal scoundrel!" he burst
forth, "so at last I've caught you! How dare you sit there and look
me straight in the face? You infernal thief, how dare you? how
dare you?"
Bertram rose and confronted him. His own face, too, flushed
slightly with righteous indignation; but he answered for all that
in the same calm and measured tones as ever: "I am NOT a scoundrel,
and I will not submit to be called so even by an angry savage. I
ask you in return, how dare you follow us? You must have known your
presence would be very unwelcome. I should have thought this was
just the one moment in your life and the one place on earth where
even YOU would have seen that to stop away was your imperative
duty. Mere self-respect would dictate such conduct. This lady has
given you clear proof indeed that your society and converse are
highly distasteful to her."
Robert Monteith glared across at him with the face of a tiger. "You
infamous creature," he cried, almost speechless with rage, "do you
dare to defend my wife's adultery?"
Bertram gazed at him with a strange look of mingled horror and
astonishment. "You poor wretch!" he answered, as calmly as before,
but with evident contempt; "how can you dare, such a thing as you,
to apply these vile words to your moral superiors? Adultery it was
indeed, and untruth to her own higher and purer nature, for this
lady to spend one night of her life under your roof with you; what
she has taken now in exchange is holy marriage, the only real and
sacred marriage, the marriage of true souls, to which even the
wiser of yourselves, the poets of your nation, would not admit
impediment. If you dare to apply such base language as this to
my lady's actions, you must answer for it to me, her natural
protector, for I will not permit it."
At the words, quick as lightning, Monteith pulled from his pocket a
loaded revolver and pointed it full at his rival. With a cry of
terror, Frida flung herself between them, and tried to protect her
lover with the shield of her own body. But Bertram gently unwound
her arms and held her off from him tenderly. "No, no, darling," he
said slowly, sitting down with wonderful calm upon a big grey
sarsen-stone that abutted upon the pathway; "I had forgotten again;
I keep always forgetting what kind of savages I have to deal with.
If I chose, I could snatch that murderous weapon from his hand, and
shoot him dead with it in self-defence--for I'm stronger than he
is. But if I did, what use? I could never take you home with me.
And after all, what could we either of us do in the end in this
bad, wild world of your fellow-countrymen? They would take me and
hang me; and all would be up with you. For your sake, Frida, to
shield you from the effects of their cruel taboos, there's but one
course open: I must submit to this madman. He may shoot me if he
will. . . . Stand free, and let him!"
But with a passionate oath, Robert Monteith seized her arm and
flung her madly from him. She fell, reeling, on one side. His eyes
were bloodshot with the savage thirst for vengeance. He raised the
deadly weapon. Bertram Ingledew, still seated on the big round
boulder, opened his breast in silence to receive the bullet. There
was a moment's pause. For that moment, even Monteith himself, in
his maniac mood, felt dimly aware of that mysterious restraining
power all the rest who knew him had so often felt in their dealings
with the Alien. But it was only for a moment. His coarser nature
was ill adapted to recognise that ineffable air as of a superior
being that others observed in him. He pulled the trigger and fired.
Frida gave one loud shriek of despairing horror. Bertram's body
fell back on the bare heath behind it.
